Glen Weyl
Article
Glen Weyl is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between January 29, 2021 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I read with interest Glen Weyl’s Why I Am Not A Technocrat”; “EDIT: See Glen Weyl’s response here”; “Glen Weyl posted a reply to my post criticizing his essay on technocracy”. It most often appears alongside Biden, COVID, Scott.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: January 29, 2021
- Last seen: October 30, 2025
Appears In
- Contra Weyl On Technocracy
- Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
- WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise
- 21
- Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism
- Links For October 2025
Related Pages
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- Biden (3 shared issues)
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- COVID (3 shared issues)
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- Scott (3 shared issues)
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- technocracy (3 shared issues)
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- Donald Trump (2 shared issues)
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- EA (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- Marx (2 shared issues)
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- mechanism design (2 shared issues)
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- New York Times (2 shared issues)
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- rationalist community (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I am not defending technocracy. But I do like evidence-based policy. So I read with interest Glen Weyl's Why I Am Not A Technocrat. It starts with a short summary of Seeing Like A State. It ties this into modern "evidence-based policy" and "mechanism design". It talks about how technocrats will always have their own insular culture and biases and paradigms, which prevent them from seeing the real world in its full complexity. Therefore, we should be careful about supposedly "objective" policies, and make sure they are always heavily informed by real people's real knowledge. Then it draws on vague rumors of the "rationalist community" and a shadowy figure named "Eliezer Yudkowsky" to create a completely fictional reimagination of us as a group of benighted people who don't understand any of these things, and just go around saying "hurr durr top-down systems are great, no way there could possibly be anything our models don't capture."
Inline links: Why I Am Not A Technocrat
I think the rationalist and EA communities have been working on the project of trying to develop the metis of balancing all of this correctly, and I continue to be optimistic about our progress on that front. EDIT: See Glen Weyl’s response here.
Inline links: trying to develop, here
Glen Weyl posted a reply to my post criticizing his essay on technocracy, and kindly agreed to let me elevate it into a top-level post.
I’ve very slightly edited some parts to adjust for differences in how the code works. You can read more from Glen Weyl on his website, his Twitter, or by buying his book.
The first reason I'm talking about this now is to respond to a point that came up in my discussions with Glen Weyl on technocracy.
Or maybe it’s exactly cute enough that it needs to be its own city, who knows? Mariposa seems to be proposing some really interesting things, including quadratic funding (an innovative budgeting mechanism pushed by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin, among others) and dominant assurance contracts (a really neat consensus-building mechanism proposed by Alex Tabarrok). Their form-based walkable city code thing also seems pretty neat. And I’m not a midwife so for all I know ecstatic birthing is also some kind of super-great idea. Honestly this random husband-and-wife team seems to have put more thought into genuinely good governance than 99.9% of the existing countries in the world, and I hope things work out for them.
Actually, [that post] was an attempt at clarifying common attentional/perception blindspots I had mapped out for groups in the community over the preceding two years. Part of that was illustrating how Glen Weyl might be thinking differently than thought leaders in the community.
Everyone who studies biochem asks themselves at some point “Why do cells need such long signaling pathways?” - ie so many chemicals whose only point is to activate other chemicals and so on in a chain, until the last chemical in the chain makes something happen. If I understand this paper right, it’s claiming that if each chemical has enough positive and negative inputs, this is analogous to a neural network, capable of making primitive decisions about cellular behavior. I asked some real biologists, who were not nearly as impressed with this thesis as I was and said that although these chains do help set cellular behavior, the analogy between levels of a chemical and the activation function of a neuron was too weak to carry so much weight. I still wonder whether insights from mechanistic interpretability could help us understand networks like these. 9: Political Symbols and Social Order: Confederate Monuments And Performative Violence in the Post-Reconstruction US South. Study claims that Confederate monuments reduced racial violence by serving as a substitute for it; when there was a Confederate monument in town, Southerners felt less need to enforce white supremacy in other ways. Therefore, removing racist monuments increases anti-black hate crimes. This finding is a little too cute, but I love imagining the world where we take it seriously and woke people demand a General Lee statue on every corner. 10: Sol Hando attends the Curtis Yarvin vs. Glen Weyl debate so you don’t have to. You won’t find many surprises about the content/arguments here, but it’s an interesting look at the personalities, the venue, and the debate as a cultural moment. 11: Pharmacy-blogger Benjamin Jolley becomes the latest Substacker to donate a kidney; congratulations Benjamin. My choice to donate felt right before I donated, it makes me feel satisfied that I did a good thing for another person, and it makes me feel like I’m making choices that are consistent with my belief system. The care team involved in the process were professional, exuded competence, and reassured me throughout the process. To others that I’ve discussed it with, it seems like a very large thing, which I suppose it is, but functionally the largest burden on my life so far has been that I haven’t been able to pick up my three year old when she asks me “hold me, daddy!”, because I’m not supposed to lift anything more than 10 pounds for the first 6 weeks after surgery. That burden will go away in 2 weeks. Completing all of the pre-operative blood draws, appointments, and other tests, plus my admission to the hospital in total took up about 100 hours of my life, mostly in the hospital recovering. While I hope that a few people in my sphere of influence will consider donating too (if you want to, filling out this form will connect you to your local hospital to start the process), my real hope is that we can solve the shortage of kidney donations more permanently. Zero people on the waitlist. People only on dialysis as a brief stopgap before they get their donated kidney. Let’s make that dream a reality. Inspiring words - but my personal strongest reaction was relief at learning that I wasn’t the only supposedly-competent health professional to bungle the urine jug. 12: The Case For A Technocratic Doge. This went an entirely different direction than I expected based on the title. 13: According to Justin Grimmer (X) and the Polarization Research Lab, there is been no change in support for political violence over the past two years: And related data from Jay Baxter here (X). 14: A surprising LLM failure mode: if you ask questions like “answer with a single word: were any mammoths still alive in December”, chatbots will often answer “yes”. It seems like they lack the natural human assumption that you meant last December, and are answering that there was some December during which a mammoth was alive. I find this weird because LLMs usually seem very good at navigating the many assumptions you need to communicate at all; this one stands as a strange exception. 15: Claim (X): some of the flags you see behind world leaders aren’t real cloth, but “flag cones” designed to avoid the problem where real flags might drape awkwardly and look wrong. 16: The oldest surviving joke book is the Philogelos (X) from ~300 AD. An Abderite hears that beans cause wind, so he hangs a sackful on his sailing ship.
Inline links: this paper, Political Symbols and Social Order: Confederate Monuments And Performative Violence in the Post-Reconstruction US South., attends the Curtis Yarvin vs. Glen Weyl debate, becomes the latest Substacker to donate a kidney, this form, The Case For A Technocratic Doge, Justin Grimmer (X), Polarization Research Lab, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a9vN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda934f72-6a31-4cec-bccd-46f7610c7fb4_2008x654.jpeg, related data from Jay Baxter here (X), A surprising LLM failure mode, Claim (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!47SM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F94cc58e5-9d0c-4ffe-8d75-340332cc1757_583x588.png, Philogelos